


won't you shake a poor sinner's hand?

by consumptive_sphinx



Category: Descendants (Disney Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:33:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21756844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/consumptive_sphinx/pseuds/consumptive_sphinx
Summary: Jules Facilier does what he can to give his daughters a good life.
Relationships: Celia Facilier & Dr. Facilier, Dr. Facilier & Tiana (Disney)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 50





	won't you shake a poor sinner's hand?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wildwestwind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildwestwind/gifts).



> I am informed that Celia has a canonical sister named Freddie. However, Freddie is a stupid name for a New Orleans Creole-speaking man to give his child, and also I haven't seen the Wicked World shorts, and so I have given her a different sister named something else. This was deliberate and not a canon mistake.

Celia's daddy hugs her before she leaves for Auradon, scoops her up and kisses her forehead like she's still a little kid who doesn't weigh hardly anything, and tells her, "Now, if you meet Tiana when you're in Auradon, what are you gonna call her?" 

Celia scrunches up her face like you do when your dad hugs you and you don't actually want him to stop but there are people watching and you have to turn him down anyway, even though there isn't anyone there but the two of them, and he laughs and kisses her forehead again and puts her down and she hugs him back then because some things are more important than habits that won't matter in Auradon anyway. "I'm gonna call her Ma'am, daddy. And I'm not going to New Orleans until you're there with me. — I'm gonna miss you." 

And her daddy smiled that soft sad smile he got sometimes and said "That's my girl. I'm gonna miss you too," and hugged her again, and this time Celia didn't protest even just for the look of it, but she did have to punch her big sister in the arm before Nat would quit  _ grinning _ at her like that. 

(Nat hugs her too, of course, before she leaves. Even on the Isle sisters are sisters.) 

  
  


The Isle of the Lost has something that they call a school but doesn't much resemble one; it isn't too clear to Jules why they even bother with it. Jules sends his girls there to exactly the extent that they want to be sent, which Nat does until she's done enough networking with her classmates and teachers to make it on her own and Celia doesn't at all, and teaches them himself the rest of the time. 

He teaches Celia how to read out of the books the mainlanders throw away, teaches her arithmetic and then skips straight to algebra and trigonometry because that's what Jules remembers best and that's what Celia wants to learn. She picked up reading and numbers faster than he had, and technically Jules doesn't know it isn't that she's not spending her days in a school with no books and exhausted teachers but — privately, of course — he's pretty sure she's just that smart. 

He teaches both his daughters rhetoric and storytelling and cold reading and sleight of hand, how to read tarot and how to pretend to read tarot, how to make themselves underestimated and when they'd want to. The island school offers classes in plotting, but Jules doesn't trust Tremaine with his girls as far as he can throw her and so he pulls Nat out of that class and teaches both of them cons, starts them on shell games and three-card monte. He teaches them about New Orleans, teaches them tricks like the fiddle game and the fortune teller's scheme that won't work in a population as small as the Isle's, teaches them how to choose a mark and how to hook one; he doesn't have to teach them about money, if there's one thing the Isle teaches just fine it's how to be smart with your resources, but he teaches them tricks you can't do without a banking system to play around in, teaches them as best he can how the world works when there are good people (gullible people, he says to Nat, because that’s how to get her to listen) setting up its institutions. 

(They don’t say  _ I love you _ to their kids, on the isle; the ones like Maleficent don’t because they don’t feel it and the ones like Smee don’t because that’s for good people, and on the Isle they’re not good people. Jules has enough reputation to spare that he doesn’t mind spending some on making sure his girls grow up hearing it anyway.) 

Most importantly of all, he teaches his daughters how to bail: how to let go of costs you've sunk, how to tell when a good deal is too good to be true, and how to let yourself see when you’ve dug yourself deep enough. He teaches them about shadows that promise they'll be your friends if you just hand over your soul and sign right there on the dotted line, and buying with credit and paying for your credit with more credit, and debt that racks up and racks up. He tells them the story of a woman with a dream and a man who tried to sell it to her, and when he gets to the man being dragged down to Hell by the shadows he called friends he says "Now, what's the lesson here?" 

"Don't mess with the other side," says Celia. 

"Don't spend what you haven’t got yet," says Nat, who's eleven and knows this story, and Jules hugs them both and says "That's right. You listen to your sister, both of you." 

  
  


Celia comes home after only two days on the mainland, and Jules would ask what went wrong but she's grinning and bouncing on the balls of her feet, and is that the future queen of Auradon she has in tow? 

Jules smiles and laughs and pulls Celia into a not-quite-hug so she won't have to push him away and says "What kind of hustle do you have going with these shiny folk," plays up his accent like you do when you're performing for white folk, and trusts Celia to catch that hint and know what it means. 

"No hustle," and Celia's still smiling, "I've got  _ friends _ on the other side," and she says it like a joke and she means it like a joke, all part of the performance, but Jules's heart still skips a beat or two — 

—  _ if you call a man your friend you'd best make sure you mean it, because if you get to calling someone your friend you might get to thinking they really are  _ — 

"Well," Jules tells her, and his voice is smooth, "you just make sure you get your cut," because what he can't say in front of Queen-to-be Mal is  _ Don't be like me, baby girl. Don't fail how I failed. I love you. _


End file.
